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Friday, August 3, 2012

A friend of mine sent me an article: “Can you trick your ageing body into feeling younger?” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11284180I
am not sure what she meant by sending me this. (What would you think if
a woman - significantly younger in years - sent you such an article?)
The thing is, when it comes to unpleasant things like ageing, my best
line of defence is simply “denial”. But when things are shoved into your
face through a slot in your inbox, it makes it harder to ignore.The
article relates to an experiment designed to test the hypothesis first
put out by Professor Ellen Langer of Harvard University: “If elderly
people dress, live and talk as they did in their heyday, will they feel
younger and fitter? “ Yes, the same disturbing image flashed through my
mind - that of a group of elderly people dressed up as hippies, or even
worse - in 70’s garb and hairdo, speaking in what was once considered
“cool” slang. But
the experiment has at least spared us this disturbing spectacle. It
was designed to make a group of elderly people feel younger by
recreating an isolated world resembling what they had left behind 35
years before, and placing them in this world for a week. I am not going
to go into the details of this experiment. Let’s just say that there
were positive results. You can read the rest by yourselves (and then
look for your old beads and dried flowers in the attic). But let’s continue with a few more words about ageing.I
do believe that ageing is in the mind. (Tell that to my receding
hairline.) Okay, let me reword this: the "effect of ageing" is in the
mind. Some things - such as receding hairlines - we have no control
over. But do we need artifacts from the past in order to trigger this
anti-ageing process? Perhaps it wasn’t the recreated world of younger
years at all, but merely the introduction of radical change which made
the participants feel younger. We definitely feel older when we become
stuck in a rut, and get up in the morning with really no expectation
from the day. Change brings about new challenges and opportunities. We
must exercise our minds and imaginations in order to cope with these new
stimuli, even if these are things that we experienced long ago. One
might even hypothesize that if a whole new world were created for us -
with nothing there that we recognize, neither from the past nor the
present - that the results of our feeling younger might be about the same
as those in the experiment - perhaps even better.Another
thing that might be interesting to compare is the ageing process of
“expats” to that of people who have grown up and lived in the same
culture and spoken the same language all of their lives. Would we find
any sort of definitive pattern there? Change is also involved here - at
first radical change which slowly evens out over the years.But
let’s leave our physical surroundings for a moment and concentrate on
chemistry. Does the intimate interaction with others lessen the ageing
process? Yes, I know what you’re thinking. But this doesn’t necessarily
relate to an older man dating a younger woman - although Woody Allen
would argue its benefits, first in his movie Manhattan and then in his
own personal life. I personally cannot argue the merits of such an
arrangement, mainly because of a lack of experience. I do have a good
friend, though, who dated much younger women between marriages. I asked
him once what was the cutoff point (as to how young she could be). He
said, “Well, if she doesn’t know who the Beatles are, that pretty well
says it all.” But
our intimate interaction with others needn’t necessarily be of romantic
or sexual nature. I have two very close friends in Canada and when I
return to Canada for visits, we always get together. And I must say,
that without any conscious effort, we keep each other young. We see each
other and ourselves as we always have. This was perhaps best summed up
in a dream that G (one of these two friends) had. “I
had this dream last night. I was standing by P’s car talking to P (he
was sitting in the car). I looked into the rear view mirror and P and I
looked just as we did at the age of 18. I was so excited that I wanted
to run and find you and see how you looked. But at that moment, I woke
up.”I
would gladly go into the interpretation of this dream further (when I
was 14, I read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and it soon became my
hobby to interpret my friends’ dreams, something that I still do now and
then), but we will leave it at that for now and move on.And
in moving on, let’s get back to things shoved through the slot of the
mailbox. One thing that I don’t like receiving are those so-called cute
attempts at humour about ageing (sent to me by people who are at an age
when they feel they can personally relate to such things): “You know you
are getting old when...” and so on. I agree that humour: satire and
the ability to laugh at yourself, is an essential requirement for a
healthy physique. However I see no benefit whatsoever in laughing about
getting old. If we have come to some sort of agreement that the effect
of ageing is in the mind, then succumbing to jokes about how ageing is
diminishing our physical and mental capacity is raising the white flag.
Why don’t you just shoot me, instead? But then maybe I am just becoming a grumpy old man..